If you’re starting a website or blog for recreational purposes, such as using it as an online journal, or a place to post pictures, then it should be ok to use a free service such as Blogger.com or Geocities.
However, if you’re looking to make money online, then you need to realize that you need to spend money to make money.
The startup costs of a website or blog are really inexpensive. Personally, I spent less than $20 when I first started my own website. I spent about $10 on a domain name and hosting for my website costs $5 each month.
Having my own domain name adds a sense of professionalism that a free domain name doesn’t. Using a highly recommended hosting company also gives me security that a free host does
not.
The big mistake I made that I won’t be making again.
When I first heard about blogging, I was excited to start my own. I signed up for a free account at Blogger.com and started posting. It was really simple to set up and I liked that it was easy to use.
However, I spent two months in the hospital and didn’t have access to a computer. When I got back, someone had basically stolen my account and replaced all my hard work with spam links. The next day, I purchased my own domain name and hosting package and started from scratch.
Another big mistake that many people make.
A woman on a forum asked me to review her new website. I clicked on her link and was instantly flabbergasted. It was a free domain name so there were ads for that particular company plastered all over the header of the page. It had a black background with bright pink text. She had affiliate banners stuck all over the page. There were typos and grammer mistakes in almost every sentence. There were big animated logos everywhere.
Basically, it was a mess. It was less than amateurish. My first thought was that I would never purchase anything this woman sold as long as she continued to represent it that way.
If she had gone to GoDaddy and bought a relevent domain name and hosted it with a quality web hosting company, I would have taken her more seriously. If her text and images didn’t assault my eyes, I would have actually stayed longer to see what her website was all about.
Do you see where I’m getting at here? If you want to be taken seriously and be seen as an expert in your field, you need to start with the right domain name and hosting company.
Personally, I use NameCheap.com to purchase domain names because they allow you to transfer money via Paypal into your namecheap.com account. Their domains start at $8.88 which is very reasonable. For hosting companies, I recommend ASmallOrange.com. I’ve never had a problem with them and they’re very professional.
July 26th, 2006
When first starting out as a webmaster or blogger, one of the first things you do is try and learn all the ways to get free traffic to your site or blog.
In forums, this is one of the most popular questions and you’ll see the same answers in almost every reply. I’m going to save you the trouble of searching for the answers yourself and just give them to you right here. Keep in mind that these are ideas for free traffic and not paid traffic.
1. Post in forums relevent to your site’s topic and use your link in your signature. Your link should be an enticing headline to capture the attention of the forum’s members. (If you’ve just published a new site, this is also a great way to get your site indexed in the search engines.)
2. Write articles and publish them to some of the most popular article directories. I personally like to publish to only a few. In the early days, I would publish to as many directories as I could find, but it wasn’t worth my time. Traffic levels were highest from sites like EzineArticles.com, GoArticles.com and IdeaMarketers.com.
3. Post relevent and genuine comments on other blogs. Most blogs have a ‘nofollow’ rule that prohibits your link on another blog to affect your own PageRank, but you will still get curious clickers checking out your own blog.
4. Basic Search Engine Optimization (SEO). When writing posts for your blog or material for your website, make sure your content is keyword rich without sounding too overbearing. Make the titles of your pages and headlines informative, concise and include keywords if possible. Write information that people will want to link to. Getting high quality links from other sites will increase your PageRank and will therefor increase search engine traffic. These are only a few points to consider with SEO, but because it’s such a complicated topic, I’ll leave it at that for now.
5. Keep your content fresh and updated. Search engines love this and so will your readers. This doesn’t mean you have to post 10 times a day on your blog, or add 10 new articles to your website each day. It means staying consistent and giving search engines new content to crawl and index regularly. Your readers will learn when to expect new content and it will keep your search engine results from going stale.
6. If your site or blog focuses on selling a product that you’ve created or a service that you offer, consider starting an affiliate program to help increase sales as well as traffic. Alice Seba has a lot of great information for anyone wanting to become an affiliate manager.
7. If you haven’t already done so, start collecting email addresses with an autoresponder and send out regular newsletters. Newsletters are great for reminding your visitors to come back and visit your site again. They’re also great for letting subscribers know about your products or affiliate products. Ultimately though, newsletters allow you to become more personal with your subscribers and will help you to build trust with them. For more information on how to have a successful newsletter and boost your opt-ins, visit Jimmy Brown’s List and Traffic site.
8. Approach other site owners to exchange links. Their site should be relevent without being a competitor of yours. Many people don’t have the confidence to do this and are afraid of rejection. In some cases, you won’t receive a reply, and in other cases you might be flat out denied. You must learn that this happens sometimes and just keep moving on. It doesn’t cost you anything to try but think of what you may gain.
9. Take a look at other successful blogs and websites and see if you can determine why they are so successful. Check out your competitors and figure out how you can incorporate some of their ideas on your site with your own twist.
10. Keep writing. The more content you have on your site, the more chances you have of people finding your keywords and phrases through search engines.
11. Take advantage of holidays and big events before they happen. For example, if you have a site that sells gift baskets, start promoting baskets for Mother’s Day well in advance.
12. Check your traffic stats. Your webstats contain valuable information about where your visitors are coming from, how they’re getting to your site, and what they are doing while they’re there. You can turn around and use this information to get even more traffic by deciding what traffic generating methods are working and which aren’t. It’s very important to know who your visitors are so you can use that to your advantage.
13. Give your visitors something for free. This could be a free report, ebook, software, script…whatever. Not only will you get people searching for your freebies, they’ll be telling others about it too and word of mouth will spread like wildfire. Whatever you decide to give away has to be something good. Don’t just recycle old information and tell your readers you’re giving away ’secret’ information. They’ll see right through you and will never return or refer others to your site.
14. Use the traffic you do get wisely. If there’s nothing compelling on your site to keep your traffic interested and no reason to keep them coming back, it’s a waste. Ultimately, your content should be informative, useful and unique if you want to have long term success and keep your visitors coming back for more.
July 5th, 2006
